Backa Carin Ivarsdotter

Since my Master of Fine Arts I have worked professional as an artist with a series of exhibitions in Sweden and internationally. In my exhibitions I create similar as a set designer. I use the entire room to create a special environment, with my history as a story between the lines. I make sculptures and installations that move, sounds, glows and sometimes break by its own movement and weight. Often I use the ceramic material in my exhibitions. The plasticity and ability to shape is outstanding. I am also fascinated by the possibility of surface, colors and the sound.

The recent years the emphases of my work have been in public commissions. I have made several great commissions here in Sweden. For example a 510 square meters mosaic wall with over 50 000 hand cut pieces of mirror glass and ceramic tiles. In my public Commission I choose the materials very careful to make an art piece that will last for a long time, and is “non friendly” for vandals. I explore the place carefully, to see if it has a certain history or special expression. I connect my work to the existing environment. Often I use symbols or forms from existing nature.

I have used all type of material, from steel, to glass, to ceramic and even plants. The light is an important part of the whole installation, and I always make for example spotlights as a part of the piece.

Nature is something sacred that we human destroy in a terrible speed. I feel helplessness and sorrow before this fact. As human and consumer the guilt I feel becomes an obstacle between my origin and me. The absence of nature, that I no longer am a part of Mother Nature, give me a strong wish to interpret my version of it. For me nature is something hard to understand something fascinating and sometimes scary. I have some kind of deep sorrow, since I always felt as the old medicine man in the tribe. I have strong wishes and dreams to heal with real nature power, herbs, and energy. (And now I do not talk about some flower power or modern witchcraft with incense and hot stones and “crystal energy”. I hate that industry! ) Maybe this is what drives me to do my art. To be as close to this person as I can be in these modern, materialistic time that we are living in.

I am disgust by the spending and to always be contactable. Also the stress and the noise of the city. I feel sorrow to have my friends in the computer, and not for real. I hate to have my nature experiences through BBC. I want to do it for real. To se people in good and hard times, to see tears, laughter and sorrow. To grow my own food and hunt my own meat. I am very basic really.

In my sculptures and installation I donʼt try to imitate the real nature. I give shape to an inner version of nature. An image that been filtered through television and dreams. An inner nature that contains as much the real nature out there, as my childhoodʼs magic forest and my dreams symbolic language. A kind of “after catastrophic” romanticized picture of nature. How the nature could be like, “if it still existed”. Arranged nature experience. A sterile nature that donʼt grow, who have forever stiffed in an expression.

For me all landscapes have an individual soul. Nature is dangerous and impossible to tame. It is ancient. It will strike back whatever we try to do. We will die but the earth will survive. Through all times artist have tried to imitate and reproduce nature expression. When I make my pictures of the environment I go back to an, for me very origin way of creating art.

When I was I child I created whole worlds through drawing. In these drawing I illustrated my fantasies and told myself stories. I lived these stories through the paper. When I was drawing it felt like I was a part, and really met these imaginary figures.

I often feel similar when I now create my sculptures and installation. I slowly shape them in the same time as I explore it. I never now exactly how it will look like before they are finished. I experience it while I make them- With my manic fear for water, woods and other places of untouched environment, this is probably the nearest I will come to the wild.

There are no real places or parts of nature as a model. I just make my inner nature and places that I will miss forever since they no longer exist. Nature unaffected by the human hand.

-- Backa Carin Ivarsdotter